LagosPhoto Festival Transitions to Biennial With its 2025 Edition Themed ‘Incarceration’
Yinka Olatunbosun
In step with its annual tradition of showcasing the best storytelling in photography and lens-based media that challenge dominant narratives, the African Artists’ Foundation presents the 15th edition of LagosPhoto Festival. This edition marks the Festival’s transition from an annual to a biennial format, the reopening of the AAF space in Lagos, and the first time LagosPhoto holds satellite programming in Ibadan. Curated by Courage Kpodo, with Robin Riskin and Maria Pia Bernardoni, and assisted by Kadara Enyeasi, under the artistic direction of Azu Nwagbogu, the 2025 LagosPhoto Biennale explores the visible and invisible architectures of captivity that shape our lives today. This is the first Biennale edition since the transition in 2023.
With venues such as African Artists’ Foundation, Nahous Gallery, Didi Museum, Freedom Park, Alliance Française de Lagos and Ibadan (New Culture Studios), the biennial which kicked off on October 25 will run till November 29.
According to the curators, “The 2025 LagosPhoto Festival is a call to examine the many forms of incarceration—imposed by the self or by others—that continue to threaten subjugated peoples in their efforts to shape their futures.” Indeed, LagosPhoto is an invitation to explore pathways and struggles toward freedom, and how images can be tools for enacting, cracking and reimagining carceral systems.”
Incarceration manifests in many forms and may not be instantly apparent. The global carceral system is built on institutions and policies justified by reformist ideals and the management of society’s perceived ills. But the less apparent dimensions of incarceration include psychological, ideological and spiritual cages, which are powerful and deeply rooted precisely because they do not need walls to confine. They entangle the soul, conditioning dreams, choices, and the very imaginations of freedom. These abstract forms of confinement—quiet, enduring, and often internalized—are what make the carceral condition so insidious.
The carceral system relies on processes that survey, police, and classify. Rendering visibility is inherent to these processes, and throughout history, photography, as a technical medium in its purported objectivity, has been deployed to serve that purpose.
Undoubtedly, photography and lens-based media played a pejorative role in conquest, creating the visual propaganda that documented, justified and sustained the colonial project. Yet photography has also played a crucial role in many resistance and emancipatory efforts. It has documented moments of social and political liberation, from jubilant celebrations surrounding independence declarations, to the architectural visions of newly sovereign states, and to immortalizing the joys of daily life. It has also enacted movements of aesthetic and technological liberation, from propelling modern reimaginings of painting, and enabling the abstraction of reality, to rendering time inside the picture plane. In these acts, photography becomes a tool of empowerment, challenging systems of control, breaking bounds of perception and composition, and reclaiming narratives and visibility on one’s own terms.
This festival continues AAF’s exploration of the scope of photography, embracing media forms and apparatuses beyond the limits of a camera’s frame and cycles. Artists’ work spans figurative, abstract, scenic, and still-life genres; manifests through printed, sculptural, woven, dyed, and performative forms; engages media including image, film, sound, text, installation, and archival material; and employs manual, digital, terrestrial, and ancestral technologies. Works on show test photography as a device for dialectical freedom and control, and image-making both within and beyond colonial constructs of the camera.
Framed by the festival’s theme of incarceration and freedom, selected works probe the afterlives of trauma and deterritorialization, between personal memory and collective dislocation: Ayobami Ogungbe’s woven series imagines the emotional textures of displacement, while Geremew Tibagu renders ghostly landscapes shaped by conflict and its aftermath. On another note, Cesar Dezfuli and Stefan Ruiz trace how their subjects navigate carceral and border systems through portraits that expand the scope and temporality of ethnographic traditions. Additionally, artists like Yagazie Emezi and Nuotama Bodomo rework ethnographic traditions through indigenous crafts and knowledge: Emezi’s spiritually guided practice invokes ancestral memory through, textiles, archives and ritual; while Bodomo’s work in film dismantles colonial story forms through Afro‑indigenous rhythms and compositions. Other artists reflect on psychological and ecological devastation, from Shirin Neshat’s melody of haunting violence within states of apparent freedom, to Sharbendu De’s speculations on futures of climate crisis.
As the first edition in a newly established biennial format, this year’s LagosPhoto marks the beginning of a transformative and experimental chapter—one that builds on the festival’s 15-year legacy whilst forging fresh dialogues and directions on invention, resistance and freedom. This slower format consists of open-call selections and a curated core, with special focus on archival engagements, intertextual interpretations, and research-based collections. Selected proposals span the African continent, its diaspora and global affinities, while maintaining a strong core in Anglophone, Francophone, indigenous, and translocal West Africa. Projects address critical issues of ecology, migration, identity, religion, and architecture, and excavate literary, luminous and literal prison systems.
This year’s edition also activates historical spaces with a cultural impetus. Macro- and micro-exhibitions are networked between historic sites of gathering, exchange, opening and containment, where works dialogue with the historic shifts of the spaces they inhabit. In Lagos, the curated core projects are distributed across three parallel venues: the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) space, reopening after two years of closure; the nearby Nahous Gallery, newly opened within the historic Federal Palace complex (a key venue for the FESTAC celebrations of 1977, and where Nigeria’s Declaration of Independence was signed in 1960); Didi Museum, Nigeria’s first private museum; and Freedom Park, situated on the grounds of country’s first colonial prison, repurposed as a civic commons.
As the festival’s footprint extends beyond Lagos to include Ibadan—an historic center and capital of Oyo State—the New Culture Studio designed by Demas Nwoko in 1970 is activated for works that explore the afterlife and architectural dimensions of incarceration.
Additional satellite venues for this year’s edition include Alliance Française de Lagos, a long-term collaborator and supporter of LagosPhoto Festival’s past editions. As a cultural institution, Alliance Française de Lagos remains committed to fostering cross-cultural dialogue through the arts. According to the director of Alliance Française de Lagos, Marc Brébant, the continued partnership with the African Artists’ Foundation for LagosPhoto underscores the power of photography to connect communities, inspire new perspectives, and strengthen the creative ecosystem in Nigeria and beyond.
LagosPhoto 25 is sponsored by National Geographic, Canon, Open Society Foundations, Alliance Française de Lagos and Nahous Gallery. This edition is carried out with support from local creative houses Kòbọmọjẹ́ Artist Residency (K-AiR), Wunika Mukan Gallery, and the Architectural Students’ Association of the University of Ibadan. Followers can engage from both up-close and from afar, through talks and events; online activations; and intertextual collaborations including artistic and curatorial essays in The Republic Journal, and image-text dialogues with TenderPhoto.
Leads LagosPhoto; focuses on challenging dominant narratives through critical visual storytelling.
Courage Dzidula Kpodo, the lead curator, is a recent architecture-graduate and researcher based between Ghana and the US. He has architecture degrees from KNUST in Kumasi and MIT in Boston. His work is primarily concerned with the socio-cultural transformations within built and unbuilt spaces, the aspirations of the humans or non-humans that make them, and the materials that support or resist these transformations. He has expressed this in a range of media, first in an archival image-based project he co-founded called Postbox Ghana, which investigates the intersection of architecture and the image-making cultures in post-independent Ghana and African states. With a research outlook, this work has been installed in various public sites in Ghana including the Makola market, a repurposed concrete grain silo, and a commercial billboard. He was invited to present iterations of this work in the 2023 Architecture Biennial in Venice under the Curator’s special project, “Guests from the Future,” and in the 2023 Vantage Point photography exhibition in Sharjah.
He worked on the set-design and production for a 40-minute single-take film that explored the social tensions of the north-south rural-urban migration within Ghana. The film, “Certain Winds from the South”, screened in 3 Ghanaian cities (Accra, Kumasi, Tamale) and internationally in New York and Berlin’s International Film Festival.
In 2024, he led the construction of a 2-kilometer path through the cocoa hills of Ghana. As an ongoing body of work, the path would become the catalyst and site for generating socio-economic futures in a place historically shaped by the cocoa cash-crop production. He worked with a group of 7 farmers implicated by the path and its politics. It became the stage and site for his Master of Architecture thesis in MIT, where he proposed an ecological and architectural framework to realize those futures. He subsequently won MIT’s 2025 Arthur Rotch Prize (1872-1873), for the graduating student with the highest academic achievement. He has given talks, lectures, interviews and panel discussions in several institutions including KNUST, MIT, the Architectural Association, and the BBC.
Robin Riskin is a curator born in New York and based in Ghana, connected to artist communities across Accra, Kumasi, Tamale and neighboring regions. Her intersectional practice explores alternate and ancestral futures of curating in the wake of the white cube. She grew her hybrid practice amongst radical artist communities in Ghana, through research with traditional healers, and as the third generation in a family of independent music publishers. Riskin completed her MFA Curating studies at KNUST, Kumasi, where she is a Ph.D. candidate for her project on “curious curating”. She has curated and made “curating-art” for museums, galleries and artist-led institutions across Ghana and West Africa, and her hybrid curating language has followed artists’ projects to Paris, London, Ljubljana, Vienna, Kassel, Frankfurt, Florence, Nairobi and New York.
Riskin curated SCCA Tamale’s current group show, “The Writing’s on the Wall” (2025-26); the traveling exhibition “Jojo Abdallah: Psy-Tech” at the National Museum of Ghana and Red Clay, Tamale (2024-25); “Jesse Weaver Shipley: Routes of Rebellion” at Nuku Studio (2023-24); and “Daniel Quarshie: Home” with Compound House Gallery in Kumasi (2023). She has also curated shows for Gallery 1957, Accra by Kofi Agorsor, Afia Prempeh, and Jeremeiah Quarshie (2023, 2021, 2016); and for Afikaris Gallery, Paris by Elolo Bosoka (2025). She was an early student co-curator on blaxTARLINES Kumasi’s maiden shows in Kumasi and at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Accra (2015-16). She has exhibited hybrid “curating-art” in the form of mashup film, sound and text at NCAI Nairobi (2025); Fondation Zinsou, Ouidah (2024); the National Museum of Science and Technology, Accra (2024-25); Red Clay and SCCA Tamale (2024-26); with baseprojects and Compound House Gallery in Accra and Kumasi (2023-25); and for the Ljubljana Biennial, Vienna Architecture Biennial, and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Paris (2023-24).
Maria Pia Bernardoni is a contemporary arts’ curator, international project facilitator and art events’ organizer. With a background in humanities and law, she is interested in human rights and issues of contemporary relevance, particularly investigating the role of photographic representations of identity, culture, spaces, social interactions and genders. Her main interest lies in the organization and promotion of community-based projects’ domain as she strongly believes in the positive socio-economic impact of participatory processes.
Kadara Enyeasi is a multidisciplinary artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. A graduate of architecture from the University of Lagos, Kadara’s work combines an interest in history, design, and literature. Best known for his work in photography and digital collage, his practice has expanded to take on painting, moving image, tactile processes, and abstraction. His curatorial work overlooks trends for an in-depth investigation into artistic developments and exchange within Lagos.
Vetum Gima Galadima is a Curatorial and Creative Assistant at the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) and LagosPhoto Festival.An archaeologist, curator, and multidisciplinary artist from Kaduna, Nigeria, Vetum’s practice explores the reinterpretation of heritage models within contemporary contexts, bridging the gap between tradition and innovation. Through an experimental approach that spans gaming, visual art, textiles, photography, augmented reality, and narrative writing, she reimagines how cultural memory can be experienced and preserved in the modern age.
Participating artists with solo presentations include Khanya Zibaya (South Africa), Bongiwe Phakathi (South Africa), Massow Ka (Senegal), Sharbendu De (India), Ayobami Ogungbe (Nigeria), Arnold Tagne Fokam (Cameroon), Lamees Saleh Sharaf Eldin (Egypt), Sadiq Al Harasi (Yemen), Geremew Tigabu (Addis Ababa), Sumayah Fallatah (Saudi Arabia), Diva Arsene Mpiana (Democratic Republic of Congo)Cesar Dezfuli (Spain), Alia Ali (Yemen/Bosnia/US), Fibi Afloe (Ghana) & Ann Cassiman (Belgium), Tejumola Bayowa (Nigeria), Johis Alarcon (Ecuador), Oladele Bello (Nigeria), Stefan Ruiz (America), Nuotama Bodomo (Ghana), Yagazie Emezi (Nigeria), Shirin Neshat (Iran), Postbox Ghana, Danielle Wood (America) and Rahi Rezvani (Iran).
Notable collaborating artists at the biennial include Jesse Weaver Shipley (America) & Gerald Annan-Forson (Ghana/Britain), Emeka Ogboh (Nigeria) & Samuel Baah Kortey (Ghana), Robin Riskin With Anna Friemoth (America), Penny Gentieu (America), and Pierre Gentieu (America) as well as Zinsou Archives projects by Alisa Martynova (Russia/Italy) and Robin Riskin (America/Ghana) in collaboration with Martine de Souza (Benin).
Institutional collaborations feature Magnum Photos with artists such as Sai (Burma), Mykhailo Palinchak (Ukraine), Ira Lupu (Ukraine), Fawaz Oyedeji (Nigeria), Newsha Tavakolian (Iran), Antoine D’Agata (France). In addition, Afrotopia parades artists such as Mbali Dhlamini, NEEMA, Ayomide Tejuoso (Plantation), James Muriuki, Margaret Ngigi, Carlos Idun, Koffi Seble, Melanie Issaka, Shitanda, William (Malawi) King and Shawn Newson. Others include Tender Photo which presents “Kindred” (Curated by Emmanuel Iduma and Ayobami Adebayo); The Republic Journal presents “Another Nigeria” photography competition; Institut Francais x Fati Abubakar Art Foundation: Reframing the North East. The biennial is sponsored by National Geographic, Canon, Open Society Foundations,Motomedia, Framegidi, New Culture Studios, The Embassy of Spain in Nigeria, Nahous Gallery and Alliance Française de Lagos.
